Introducing theoretical concepts in an innovative way

Hello! In today's post I'm going to give you a tip/idea for introducing theoretical concepts in an innovative way.

My idea is presenting new information by using a comic design, for example like this:

I hope you found it interesting!

My first day as a teacher in a Secondary School

Today I was very curious about my new adventure to come. The thing is that I was going to start my training course in order to become an English language teacher.

So I took a shower, I dressed up and I went to my new School Font de Sant Lluís. The High School director received me and other masters’ students in a big room and described us the characteristics of the center. At the moment, there are 68 teachers and 630 students. The courses studied are E.S.O., 4 kinds of baccalaureate: science, humanities and arts (music and dance-theater) and a Course on Design of Web Apps. He also explained us the working philosophy of the center. He told us that a couple of years ago, they had a problem which was that the average of failure in the first courses was very high (1st and 2nd of ESO). They solved the problem by organizing the year’s plan within areas instead of subjects. That means that the subjects of Spanish, Valencian and Knowledge of the Environment were fused in the Sociolinguistic Area. In every lesson, two teachers as well as several volunteers participate so that they have to negotiate with each other the organization of the lesson. Along the years they have realized that the motivation, the quietness and consequently the number of failures have decreased drastically. In reference to the English subject, this is tought as usually.

The director also made very interesting reflections that I would like to share in this post. He said that nowadays the Educational System in Spain is obsolete because we are living in the Technological Era. So we have to provide our students with what they are demanding: "if they need you to teach them how to search information properly on the Internet, you will have to". As teachers, we have to develop the critical thinking (for example, make them aware of the subliminal messages which are transmitted in the media, films, news, advertisements…) and the cooperation among our students. For these reasons, in Font de Sant Lluís School there are far fewer books used in class and sometimes teachers and students generate their own materials. The AMPA of the center has done a campaign for the parents to buy their children tablets instead of books: "a tablet costs you 100€ and your child can have it for his/her all life, and an amount of books costs you much more money every year". The teachers, the students and the parents can keep in contact to each other through email and have a fluent communication through other platforms such as Google Drive or Moodle. Another idea which this center has developed is working in projects for a week, as they have already started to do in Finland this year 2016. This year’s topic is "trips experience". It will be held from the 18th to the 22th of April. Then there is the “Primavera Educativa”, a congress organized by the Conselleria in the bed of the River Turia (Valencia), where Schools can present their projects. It will be celebrated the 13th, 14th and 15th of May 2016. Font de Sant Lluís School also works a lot with volunteers. In the evenings, the Library of the School is open for those students who need help with homework and have not this support in their families. So the volunteers are retired people from the neighborhood, parents… The School also organizes free activities for the people living in the neighborhood and the teachers: yoga, film meeting discussions, etc.

For the moment, everything seems to be very innovative according to the content I studied in my Masters' subject IDIIE. It surprised me because I'm talking about a public School in Spain. Let's see how it goes!

What would you do to make School more useful to your life and turn you on to learning?

I think this is a question we all as teachers have thought about many times. Here is my opinion/answer:

The main thing I would do is engaging students to participate in their own learning process and making them aware of their own progress. A very interesting system to do so is the self-evaluation of the activities implemented in class. A crucial thing is the teacher to give them feedback and guide them to discover their strengths or their weaknesses by themselves. In addition, the “lateral thinking” is a technique which enables students solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. All these ways of operating inside a classroom help students to be more organized, attentive and critical, which will help them in their future lives.

Another very important thing I would do is to adapt the boring contents into real life situations, in order to increase the interest and motivation. This is for the students to understand that they are in school learning things that they would lately use in the real world surrounding them. Related to this, I would also promote the individual learning, which means the students to learn/investigate what they are more interested in/curious about.

Other things would be shorting down the time of each lesson with brain breaks, promoting more active lessons (working in groups, role-plays, drama, songs...) or engaging parents in their children learning process.

Activities resulted from a combination of a joke and a tale

We could think that oil and water cannot disolve with each other. But we can always try to do the best combination. In today's post I propose you a lesson plann resulted from the combination of a joke and a tale:

Joke

One Chinese person walks into a bar in America late one night and saw Steven Spielberg.

As he was a great fun of his movies, he rushes over to him, and asks for his autograph.

Instead, Spielberg gives him a slap and says, “You Chinese people bombed our Pearl Harbour, get out of here”.

The astonished Chinese man replied “It was not the Chinese who bombed your Pearl Harbour, it was the Japanese”.

Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, you’re all the same”, replied Spielberg.

In return, the Chinese gives Spielberg a slap and says, “You sank the Titanic, my forefathers were on that ship”.

Shocked, Spielberg replies, “It was the iceberg that sank the ship, not me”.

The Chinese replies, “Iceberg, Spielberg, Carlsberg, you are all the same”.

Tale: The Butterfly in your hands

Far away in China, an old man and very smart one lived in a village. Many of the villagers and nearby villages came to learn from him and get his advice. It was said that he never made a mistake and every question had an answer and every problem had a solution. One day some children decided to do a mischief, tried to outwit the old man and said, "Everyone always says that he is never wrong, and always knows the right answer. This time we'll beat him and he won't have a choice and he'll be wrong". They took a butterfly in their hands and said, "We'll keep the butterfly between our hands and we will ask the old man whether the butterfly is alive or dead? If he says that it is alive, we'll crush the butterfly and if he says that it's dead, we'll open our hands and release the butterfly. They went to the old man and asked him, "Dear old man, is what we have in our hands alive or dead?" The old man looked at them with his smart eyes and said, "It depends on your hands".

LESSON PLANN (ABSTRACT)

Level: Students of 1^st of Bachillerato

Time: 45 minutes

Method: Communicative Approach

Skills developed (mostly): reading, speaking, oral interaction, listening

Activity 1: Warm Up - Fly like a Butterfly (5 min.)

Students have to go around the class thinking they are butterflies and they feel free. While they are flying, encourage them to focus their minds on how they would like to feel during the lesson (positive aspects: happy, motivated, participative, relaxed/active...). Say the students out loud: how are you feeling today? How would you like to feel during the lesson? Are you feeling happy? Are you feeling motivated? Will you participate during the lesson?

Activity 2: Reading and questioning the joke and the tale (10 min.)

Once the students have woken-up, spare them in two groups. Give one group the joke and another group the tale. Ask them to read the texts for themselves in silence. Then tell them to write a list highlighting the things/ideas they found more interesting/funny. At the same time, ask them to write questions of what they didn’t understood regarding vocabulary or other aspects.

Activity 3: Talking about the joke and the tale (20 min.)

Encourage the students to talk among them about what they found interesting in the texts and share their thoughts and ideas. Tell the students to ask the questions they have formulated to their mates in order to know if they have the answer. Give the students a list of questions you would like them to take into account, such as: who is Spielberg? What is Pearl Harbour? It would be interesting if they have access to a paper version dictionary or an online one, or if they can search on the Internet what they want to know.

Activity 4: Changing chairs (10 min.)

Tell the students to pair with someone who has read a different text as he/her. Ask them to share their stories, spotlighting the thinks they have learned about the two texts, what they knew before and what they know now... Classify the two texts according to different categories given: funny, interesting, boring, sad...

As the students are leaving the class, ask them how they are feeling. It is always very important to take into account their feelings.